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How gender bias affects healthcare

bbc.com

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Re: How gender bias affects healthcare

#31

Post by Mirioron »

tehwebguy wrote: post #4

> ...it took another few years to find another set of doctors who would take her symptoms seriously. “I had a lot of, ‘You’re just hysterical,’ ” she remembers. “One of the more common things, especially in emergency rooms, was ‘You’re just drug seeking.’” > As a woman of colour, Jackie was facing more than gender bias. A friend of mine (black, female) was shooed away by doctors as "drug seeking" and later told she h…

There might be bias at play, but this kind of different treatment happens to all sexes and races. It depends on doctors. I'd like to bring up people with ADHD being treated as drug-seekers, but I can't seem to find any real data on it. All I have are collections of anecdotes anyone could read up on by googling it and reading forums or simply reading reddit about it. On the other hand, that's going to be very biased.

Re: How gender bias affects healthcare

#32

Post by Retric »

yasp wrote: post #30
Retric wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bayesian reasoning is a terrible fit for healthcare because it ignores risks. Suppose 99% of the time a set of symptoms is harmless and 1% of the time it's deadly. A 1% risk of death is extremely high and needs to be taken seriously even if ignoring it would be correct 99% of the time.

This exact case is discussed in Eliezer Yudkowsky's "An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem" [0]. [0] http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes

That's describing probabilities of truth, not the correct responses to those probables. I did not say false positives or false negatives etc, I simply said the post diagnosis odds.

Doctors and patients have little reason to care about odds directly they care about Risk which is ~= odds * harm. Odds going from say 10 to 15% or 0.015% to 0.02% don't have big impacts on your net Risk.

Re: How gender bias affects healthcare

#33

Post by whattheasdf »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #20
PunchTornado wrote: post #2

Meanwhile, men are accorded fewer visits at doctors (GP) in UK. 32% fewer visits compared to women: http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/3/8/e003320 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8588686.stm When I go to the GP she makes me feel like I'm intruding and wasting her time, like you're a man in your 20s, nothing could be wrong..

Maybe get a better GP? Seriously, I've never encountered this attitude. Doctors seem to be generally fairly clinical and professional.

[dead]

Re: How gender bias affects healthcare

#34

Post by PunchTornado »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #24
PunchTornado wrote: post #2

Meanwhile, men are accorded fewer visits at doctors (GP) in UK. 32% fewer visits compared to women: http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/3/8/e003320 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8588686.stm When I go to the GP she makes me feel like I'm intruding and wasting her time, like you're a man in your 20s, nothing could be wrong..

That men don't go to the doctor as much as they should, and do more visits if they are married is well established. Are you claiming that this fact is explained by the doctors actions and not by the gender norm that men should just bear with minor illness?

I think it's both. The GP doesn't seem to take you seriously if you appear to be a young healthy dude.

I once hurt my ankle really bad while doing surfing and the doctor made fun of me "being girly" and to go home and put some ice on it.

I just wanted to make sure there was nothing broken.

Only recently while thinking about it I realised how bad his attitude was and it certainly made me think at that time that it is in my head and I shouldn't go to the doctor.

Re: How gender bias affects healthcare

#35

Post by yasp »

Retric wrote: post #32
yasp wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exact case is discussed in Eliezer Yudkowsky's "An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem" [0]. [0] http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes

That's describing probabilities of truth, not the correct responses to those probables. I did not say false positives or false negatives etc, I simply said the post diagnosis odds. Doctors and patients have little reason to care about odds directly they care about Risk which is ~= odds * harm. Odds going from say 10 to 15% or 0.015% to 0.02% don't have big impacts on your net Risk.

Good point

Re: How gender bias affects healthcare

#36

Post by tomp »

Retric wrote: post #23
yasp wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose for the sake of argument that on average women have higher rates of thinking something is physically wrong with them when there isn't. Is it not rational for doctors to take a Bayesian approach and weight their diagnoses accordingly?

Bayesian reasoning is a terrible fit for healthcare because it ignores risks. Suppose 99% of the time a set of symptoms is harmless and 1% of the time it's deadly. A 1% risk of death is extremely high and needs to be taken seriously even if ignoring it would be correct 99% of the time.

That's exactly what Bayesian reasoning is.

The other time I went to the doctor to complain about back pain, and get an appointment for a physio. The doctor asked me to do some movements that didn't seem directly related to my issues. Then she explained that they have to check for a specific condition (like a spinal bulge or something) that, albeit very rare, absolutely needs to be operated on as soon as possible.

Re: How gender bias affects healthcare

#37

Post by dagw »

yasp wrote: post #22
dagw wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it not rational for doctors to take a Bayesian approach and weight their diagnoses accordingly? Not without having very detailed information on exactly how big the difference is and, equally important, how these differences are distributed within each sub-population.

So Bayesianism is good but only sometimes?

Bayesian reasoning is good when applied rigorously, but can be dangerous when applied sloppily and lazily, since people are terrible at subjectively estimating probabilities and tend to be way over optimistic when updating their priors with any new information they receive.

Basically people will treat information that should realistically cause them to update their priors from 50-50 to 51-49 as if it was information that should cause them to update to 80-20 (and then they round off too 100-0).

Re: How gender bias affects healthcare

#38

Post by dang »

aristocles wrote: post #3

Women are on average more neurotic than men, therefore physicians will be more skeptical of their claims; psychosomatic symptoms are more common for females.

We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle. This is in the site guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: How gender bias affects healthcare

#39

Post by [deleted] »

tomp wrote: post #36
Retric wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bayesian reasoning is a terrible fit for healthcare because it ignores risks. Suppose 99% of the time a set of symptoms is harmless and 1% of the time it's deadly. A 1% risk of death is extremely high and needs to be taken seriously even if ignoring it would be correct 99% of the time.

That's exactly what Bayesian reasoning is. The other time I went to the doctor to complain about back pain, and get an appointment for a physio. The doctor asked me to do some movements that didn't seem directly related to my issues. Then she explained that they have to check for a specific condition (like a spinal bulge or something) that, albeit very rare, absolutely needs to be operated on as soon as possible.

[deleted]

Re: How gender bias affects healthcare

#40

Post by tehwebguy »

yasp wrote: post #27
Dove wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rational, yes; fair, no. Group differences are real, and burying or ignoring that truth is doomed to failure, since it is obvious. However, we have a moral responsibility to evaluate every person as an individual - to give each the benefit of the doubt, regardless of how people who look like them tend to behave. I myself think this is a two way street. If you belong to a group with a particular characteristic and you…

Unfortunately there is another dimension here which is that we're allocating a scarce resource (medical care). If one group has significantly higher rates of hypocondria (again, I don't know for sure whether this is true, but assume for argument's sake that it is), and we're forced to treat everyone as an individual (i.e. ignore this fact), then this necessarily deprives other groups of resources (medical care).

I think the point is simply that if you walk in properly (appointment / insurance / etc) you should be properly diagnosed.
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